The Greeks were rewarded for obeying the laws of the gods after death. Hence the form of the argument holds. In general, the reward did consist of not suffering in Tartarus, but was a reward regardless. At best, they could hope for the Elysium fields and eventual return to the world of the living, after partaking of the waters of the Lethe, as I recall.
It seems you think I was contradicting myself. I hardly think that not accepting a hypothesis because there is seemingly a better one to explain the facts is the same as claiming the hypothesis is disproven. I haven’t even claimed that all god hypotheses have been falsified. Certainly deism can’t be falsified. We might say that the brand of religion which believes in a 6.000 year old earth has been falsified, but there are plenty of religions, and groups of Christians, which don’t believe that.
I particularly have posted in “what will convince you that God exists threads” some things that might convince me, so I clearly don’t think the god hypothesis has been disproven. I’m willing to change my opinion, based on the evidence. Are you? I can’t go further until I find out what brand of theism you believe in.
I wasn’t saying that you would consider the hypothesis in physics that you reject as disproven - I assume you know more than to do that. I was just wondering if you treated religious hypotheses the same way you treat scientific ones.
In which case it can hardly be said to be a positive argument for theism in general, as you claimed above.
What Diogenes said.
On preview; no, the wager doesn’t really hold, unless you can give me an example of an ancient Greek condemned to Tartarus for being an atheist.
The Greeks were rewarded for offering sacrifices. More to the point, the gods didn’t care about what people believed and assumption that a given deity cares what you believe is the only operational assumption that matters here.
Not that even real world theological paradigms matter. All that’s necessary is to imagine a god who is either indifferent to belief or punishes it. Any god I can imagine is just as plausible a hypothesis as the Christian conception of God. They all have exactly the same evidence.
I’ll say yet again that no one in this thread has claimed that they can disprove god, and I said just the opposite. Perhaps you are under the misconception that atheism is a statement of knowledge about god not existing. Atheism at root is the lack of belief in any god, and strong atheism is the belief that no gods exist - belief, not knowledge. So, all you need to be an atheist is to be unconvinced by all arguments for gods of whatever flavor. Proving atheism is logically equivalent to disproving all gods, which is impossible.
I don’t understand your point here. The major fallacy in the wager, besides volitional belief, is the inherent assumption that the choice is between God and no-God, vs. god 1, god 2, …, god n and no god. I don’t see how atheism is fallacious in that sense.
The problem of evil is only a problem for certain classes of gods which are claimed to be omnibenevolent. Greek gods were not, so the problem of evil is not an argument against their existence at all. I don’t think the problem of human evil is valid, for the reasons you give. I can see that free will is a greater good than any resulting damage. I’m more interested in the problem of natural evil. Preventing earthquakes and floods does not limit anyone’s free will. You’re stuck saying that every child who dies in the tsunami had to die in the tsunami; that the world would be worse off if even one of them survived. But again, that only falsifies the characteristic of omnibenevolence, not the existence of god.
BTW, we’ve been through this a lot, and though he is too modest to say it, Dio who knows more about the history of religion and theology than any five of us, has been through this exact thread hundreds of times. Many of us could probably write both sides in our sleep. 
How can we be sure life would be impossible in a universe with different physical laws?
But Pascal’s Wager also contains unstated assumptions rooted in Christianity – that is, it assumes that if God exists, God will judge your soul’s eternal fate based on your actions and/or the content of your beliefs about God. I think that does undermine its validity as a purely logical argument.
How?
Check out the Discover magazine article I linked to in post #3; it explains a lot of the reasoning behind this claim.
Try again. I never said the multiverse would prove the non-existence of God. I have said, several times, that the multiverse hypothesis undermines the argument from design, thereby removing a rational support from belief in God.
As for Pascal’s Wager, ditto what **Voyager ** said. Belief isn’t voluntary; and atheism and the god of Christianity aren’t the only two things you are wagering between.
Oh, and to possibly diverge from what some of my colleagues have said, I do think that the existence of the traditional God of Christianity–the one who is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good–is in fact disproved by the argument from evil. But if you are willing to accept as ‘god’ some being who lacked these perfections, then no, it cannot be proven that there is no ‘god’. But such a ‘god’ is utterly worthless as an explanatory hypothesis, and so I don’t see any good reason to entertain it. And again, I am confining ‘reason’ to epistemic/evidential reasons, not prudential or other sorts of reasons which have no bearing on the truth or falsity of a given explanatory hypothesis.
It is still anthropic to suppose that the existence of life is any more significant or important or notable than the non-existence of life. Any possible universe would still eventually result in “improbable” phenomena. So what? All this perceived “fine-tuning” tells us is that a universe which is amenable to life will be amneable to life. So what? Wondering at the improbability of it all is just drawing a target around an arrow.
By the way, Dawkins disputes that other possible universes couldn’t necessarily sustain something akin to life if the essential forces were combined differently.
I think i’m with Sophistry; we can’t disprove the notion of gods as a whole, because the definition of gods alone usually aren’t something you can argue against conclusively. But I do think the notion of specific, particular gods, with specific, particular characteristics, can be disproved logically within the tolerance that logic as we know it exists; if it doesn’t, then likewise we can’t know that those gods hold those positions or are not contradictory in nature. There’s still the point that I might just not understand matters correctly and that a true understanding would remove those apparent logical contradictions, but allowing for failure on my behalf opens up everyone to potential failure, thus meaning we can’t be certain about anything.
As for the free will thing as brought up briefly; I don’t belive in it, and in fact i’d say that a world with true free will would be sigificantly worse by most people’s estimation.
As a thought experiment then, pick any given theistic belief other than the one you currently hold - in fact, pick one sharply at odds with your own. Does Pascal’s wager offer you any sound logical reasons to embrace that belief?
I don’t believe that stepping on a crack in the sidewalk will break my mother’s back, but I gain nothing by stepping on one and proving myself correct. On the other hand, if I’m wrong, the consequences are considerable. I should therefore wager on the premise being true and avoid cracks.
Ah, but you’re not wagering the belief, you’re wagering the action. It’s comparitivly the same as saying we atheists gain nothing from not believing, so we should act as if we do believe - but in this case that which we’re being asked to do is believe, not act as though we do believe.
Or, as has been pointed out, if Pascal’s wager actually asks the atheist to believe in God for prudential reasons, then it is based on the false premise that ones beliefs are under ones voluntary control.
The main problem with it here though, I think, is that BrainFireBob has forwarded it as a generic support of theism (i.e. something like “It’s safer/better to believe [some unspecified thing], than not to”), but without specifics, the notion is worthless - leaving aside the issue of will - you can only believe in something that has actually been specified in some way.
Difficult to respond here.
I have a hard time grasping people do not see the bias toward atheism as good in their posts, and it coloring the positions presented. How to point that out is difficult.
It lies in remarks such as Voyager’s, about a predictive theory failing to predict, should it not be discarded in favor of one that does. Yes, it should- but that is too strong to be an analogy, because predictive models do not apply to God, and using that as a model reveals a flaw in the reasoning set. The correspondence of picture and simple is not sufficient, to butcher the imagery used in Wittgenstein. See it, yes or no? It was a remark far stronger and containing far more ground than a simple assertion that one should apply rigor- it was about rejecting a given hypothesis.
As it happens, Voyager, yes, I have rigorously gone through my belief set, and find to my irritation that too many on both sides do not examine concepts such as God, good, causality, morality et al sufficiently. As to my particular brand of theism- I do not believe I agree with a word Origen wrote, although I find much I favor in Pelagius and Arias.
As to a tangent that promises to be interesting, I would argue that things like tsunamis are neither good nor bad, simply causal phenomena, and that human behavior regarding them falls under assumption of risk. Yes, it is horrible for the people involved that there was the tsunami. However: Peoples living in the area knew there were tsunamis. People travelling to the area could easily have determined such. Does this make the tsunami “evil” for killing them, or was it simply the result in a string of causal events whose possibility was known that happened to come due? Eventually, someone will always win the lottery, even when it is the “crap” lottery.
Every time I get in a car, I accept I might die. I consider the possibility remote, but if I do have an accident and die due to, say, structural failure in the car, do I declare the structural failure evil, assigning it a false moral value? No, I do not. It is simply an occurence, and no sign of evil. What such occurences due is force accountability and responsibility, at least ideally- there may not be opportunity to change your choice later, so exercise free will and choose good now. I find the existence of such events entirely consistent with the image of an instructive-minded God.
Another minor quibble.
Differentiating between “atheism” and “strong atheism” does carry a certain scent of unwillingness to address agnosticism, which I always thought the most logically sensible, abstractly, position on an unprovable point.
And Sophistry, if beliefs are not under one’s voluntary control, then one is no more than a reactive organism lacking in free will- and then evil does not exist, since all things are merely causal in nature, and incidental. Morality loses any sort of rightness.